Six months and 500 arrests into the Jan. 6 probe, a motley crew of online sleuths is generating leads, making connections, and keeping the feds on their toes.

Bravo and thank you!

By Ryan J. Reilly

There’s a mother and former teacher in south central Pennsylvania, a woman I’ll call Joan, who has what she calls a “weird hobby.” She’s a Facebook detective.

When an enraged mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Joan was at home watching it unfold. She was deeply upset, finding herself in tears about the violent scene transpiring over 100 miles away in the nation’s capital, which she’d visited as a kid and later on field trips with her own children. “This is not who we are as a country,” she said, before pausing and adding, “Or it’s not who we’re supposed to be.”

The 'Holy Shit' Moments

Joan, the mom from Pennsylvania, stumbled into the sedition hunters world by chance. Someone in the budding community reached out through a political Facebook group she runs, hoping for publicity. The internet detectives were trying to identify the man who stormed onto the floor of the U.S. Senate wearing a “Hershey Christian Academy” sweatshirt, and they thought she could help spread the word.

Joan got to work. She went to Hershey Christian Academy’s Facebook page and started digging, learning everything she could about the small school with barely a dozen staff members. It had only opened in 2019, and now ― because someone had the bright idea of breaking into the Capitol while wearing school swag ― it was at the center of the insurrection.

“I went and started looking at all the likes, all the comments. Then on every single like and comment I would go look on their profile and snoop around and say, ‘Oh, that guy’s too fat, that guy’s too bald, that guy’s too bearded, it’s not him,’” she said.

Soon she stumbled on a “pretty vanilla” Facebook profile of a man named Zeeker whose main photo was of a snowman. When she plugged Zeeker’s name into Facebook’s search bar, she turned up photos that he’d been tagged in. She realized she might just have a match. She took some screenshots, poked around his Instagram, and did a bit of Googling.

“Zeeker Bozell,” she learned, was Brent Bozell IV — as in the son of Brent Bozell III, the high-profile conservative activist and founder of the Media Research Center, and grandson of Brent Bozell Jr., the ghostwriter for Barry Goldwater and supporter of Joseph McCarthy.

“Whoa,” she thought as she went down a Google rabbit hole and read his grandfather’s Wikipedia page, which laid out the family’s ties to William F. Buckley, who founded the National Review and is considered the intellectual godfather of the conservative movement. “I’ve really stumbled on something.”

“I mean, I’m just, like, a mom,” Joan later told me. “It was kind of a holy shit moment.”

‘How Did You Get All Of This?’

Joan dialed in her tip to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center in mid-January, just after midnight. The bureau was completely overwhelmed in the aftermath of Jan. 6, so she was stuck on hold for about 45 minutes. She gave her info, and waited for the FBI to get in touch.

Ten days later, an FBI agent gave her a call. Joan laid everything out. What Joan called her “weird little detective hobby” had left the FBI special agent impressed. ”How did you get all of this just from seeing his picture?” she said he asked her. ”You got his whole life story!”

But the FBI was swamped. Thousands of tips were pouring in everyday, and sorting through the chaos was a logistical nightmare. The charges against Bozell wouldn’t come through for weeks. Joan had at least gotten a call back ― a real, live FBI special agent was on the case. Still, like thousands of other FBI tipsters, Joan grew a bit impatient as time dragged on. ”Come on,” she thought, ”I handed this guy to you on a silver platter! Where is his arrest?”

Finally, it happened: Leo Brent Bozell IV ― aka “Zeeker” ― was arrested, and the charges against him unsealed.

And she remains astonished that Bozell wore a sweatshirt bearing the name of a tiny school his child attended as he stormed the U.S. Capitol, smashed out a window, and took over the floor of the U.S. Senate in an attempt to overturn the election on behalf of Donald Trump.

“He probably would’ve gotten away with it,” Joan joked, “if it weren’t for these meddling sleuths.”

Meet the online sleuths.

[huffpost.com]

Brent Bozell IV, Son Of Prominent Conservative Activist, Charged In Capitol Riot.

[huffpost.com]